Future unsure for Visa lottery

President Donald Trump's racially-tinged comments about immigrants from Haiti and Africa have once again focused attention on a relatively obscure program known as the diversity visa lottery.

The disparaging remarks, in which the president reportedly referred to those nations as "shithole countries," came during a private meeting Thursday on a tentative immigration deal. It would have protected so-called "dreamers" who came here illegally as children, while reallocating visas from the lottery program to migrants predominantly from Central America who are here on what is known as a temporary protected status.

The fallout has left the future of the larger immigration debate yet again in flux, with the president's language sparking alarm even among some Republicans and critics saying it demonstrates his racial insensitivity. Two top House Democrats said they will propose a resolution next week to censure the president.

Once again in the spotlight is the lottery program, which offers a speedy two-year path to legal residency for people across the world. Unlike other immigrants who gain admission to the United States, recipients do not need a close relative here or any sort of special skill and about half have hailed from Africa.

"The president's untoward language clearly highlighted his issue with race," said U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Houston Democrat and member of the Congressional Black Caucus which has opposed scrapping the program. "This is not the kind of atmosphere we need to address the diversity visa."

Trump has pushed to end the program since an Uzbekistan immigrant who came to the United States on the visa plowed his truck onto a New York City bike path in October, killing eight people.

"They have a lottery. You pick people. Do you think the country is giving us their best people? No," Trump said during a speech in December at the FBI National Academy in Virginia. "What kind of a system is that? They come in by lottery. They give us their worst people ... the worst of the worst."

In fact, applicants are actually picked through a random computerized lottery system, so no country can send its most egregious offenders.

Original purpose

More than one million people have received green cards through the program since it began in 1995. Like other legal permanent residents, they can apply for citizenship after five years.

The lottery is just a fraction of the larger immigration system, however.

Each year, only 50,000 immigrants qualify for green cards out of the roughly one million that are annually distributed through other means. It is available to people around the world, except in countries such as Mexico, China and India that already have large numbers of citizens immigrating through traditional routes.

It is the only opportunity for many immigrants, especially those from Africa and certain parts of Asia, to come to America legally and get in the so-called line, said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

"The diversity visa is the closest we get to having a line into the United States for people who don't have other pathways to immigrate," she said.

Demand is so great that in the fiscal year ending last September around 19 million people applied, according to the U.S. State Department.

The program came about after country quotas favoring Western Europeans were dropped in the Immigration Act of 1965 and replaced with a system focused on family reunification. Migration from some Asian and Latin American countries skyrocketed as a result, while the number of European arrivals, particularly from Ireland and Italy, plummeted.

"The diversity visa was to help flows that originally were coming but were no longer," Pierce said. "Specifically, the Irish."

In 1990, Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, helped make permanent a 1980s measure allowing a path to residency for citizens of countries which, like Ireland, had been "adversely affected" by the 1965 reforms.

At first, recipients were overwhelmingly European. In recent years, however, most have hailed from Africa and Asia. In 2016, Nepal, Egypt and Iran received the most visas through the program, according to the State Department.

Merit versus lottery

To qualify, applicants must have a high school education or two years of recent work experience. They undergo an extensive background security vetting process, and cannot have committed a crime, suffered a serious health problem, or have previously overstayed a visa in the United States.

Groups that support reducing immigration have called to end the program for years. They say it brings in low-skilled immigrants and people with no connection to the United States, arguing that such migrants struggle to assimilate.

"Out of the pantheon of dumb government programs this would rank right up there," said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group pushing to limit immigration. "Picking 50,000 new Americans virtually out of a hat every year makes absolutely no sense."

He said the program posed security risks, pointing to the case of an Egyptian immigrant who gained his residency through his wife's diversity visa and killed two people at Los Angeles International Airport in 2002.

The Senate's 2013 immigration bill that ultimately died in the House would have eliminated the visa. Following Trump's push last fall, several members of Congress said they would again support repealing it. Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn said the immigration system should be "more focused and more merit-oriented."

'Second thoughts'

Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell University, said that despite Trump's claims, no government or even individual can game the system since it is a true lottery. Until recently Yale-Loehr was a critic of the program. In November, he told The New York Times that a lottery is a "crazy way to run an immigration system ... No other country selects immigrants based on a lottery."

But in December, Yale-Loehr published an op-ed in the New York Daily News arguing that recipients of the diversity visa are, in fact, not less skilled than other immigrants.

Citing a 2011 report from the Congressional Research Service, he said a higher percentage of immigrants who entered the United States through the diversity visa program had managerial and professional occupations in 2009 than green card holders overall, about one-quarter compared to 10 percent. They had a lower unemployment rate - 3 percent - relative to the 8 percent of all recipients that year.

Recent Department of Homeland Security data shows that about a third of those who came through the diversity visa program in 2015 were employed in management or professional occupations, compared to the 12 percent who received their green cards through relatives.

"Philosophically, you would think you could do a better job of picking people to come to the United States through important criteria, like people who have a unique talent, or are very smart, rather than just through a lottery," Yale-Loehr said. "But after I looked at these statistics, and I saw that diversity visa lottery people are pretty much gainfully employed with a very low unemployment rate, I am now having second thoughts."

He said it helps bring a diverse pool of immigrants to the United States, noting that few people from Africa or certain Asian countries have family members here who can sponsor them and finding employers to do so is largely impossible because of the overwhelming demand and their lack of connections.

Ruth Falomo, who came to Houston from Nigeria on the diversity visa in 2014, pointed to her own family's background as proof that most such migrants were, in fact, well-educated. She and her husband are both nurses, her eldest son is a psychologist at the Houston Independent School District, and two other children are graduate students in engineering.

Taking ownership

Elena Lacheva, an acclaimed young Bulgarian pianist at the Houston Grand Opera, applied for the diversity visa three times before receiving it in 2013. Her previous employment visa had tied her to the opera, meaning she couldn't participate on any paid outside endeavors.

"I was incredibly elated," she said. "It meant I could finally take ownership of my life."

She began teaching at the University of Houston and worked with Opera in the Heights. She co-founded the Collaborative Piano Institute, a summer program in Minnesota featuring world-renowned faculty.

"I wouldn't have been able to be part of it had I not had the green card," she said.

Before, she would have had to perform at her own expense as her work visa meant she could only accept payment from the company who sponsored her.

"Now I am able to travel and give concerts in different cities," she said. "It sounds very simple, like, 'Oh, getting paid for the work you do,' but for an immigrant, it is so complicated to be paid if you don't have a green card."

Immigrants like her partner, a Venezuelan pianist who is on an employment visa at Louisiana State University and not permitted to do paid work for others.

Lacheva, who now also teaches there, said their friends are always stunned when they hear that after living here for years and working at such prestigious institutions as the opera, she was, until recently, so restricted, and that her partner remains in such a bind.

"I don't think most people understand how difficult it is to get a green card," Lacheva said.

Lomi Kriel is the immigration reporter at the Houston Chronicle, where she was the first to uncover the Trump administration’s separation of migrant families at the border in November 2017 -- six months before the policy was officially announced.

She has written on all aspects of immigration, including the tightening of asylum and mass arrests of immigrants under Trump. She has reported on the record backlogged immigration courts, impact of the 2014 influx of Central American children that overwhelmed President Obama's administration, attacks on refugees, and increased militarization of the border. She frequently reports from the border, and has also reported on immigration from El Salvador, Arizona and Washington D.C.

Previously she was a reporter for Reuters in Central America and covered criminal justice for the San Antonio Express-News.

She holds a master of arts in political journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor of arts in English from the University of Texas at Austin, where she wrote for her college newspaper.

Born and raised in South Africa, she immigrated to Houston in 1998 and speaks Spanish and Afrikaans.